Sarrasine

While writing this, Barthes is writing what has perhaps in retrospect seemed to be his most important book.

It's called S.Z. It's a huge book which is all about this short story by Balzac, Saracen, that he begins this essay by quoting.

This is what he says about Saracen.

In his story Saracen, Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence.

This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her imperious boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility." Barthes says, who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of woman? Is it Balzac the author, professing literary ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom, romantic psychology, We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

Writing is that neutral, composite oblique space where our subject, and this is a deliberate pun, our subject slips away.